Julie Touretzky, 22, was sobbing in her hospital bed as she tried to pass a kidney stone when the cosmic humor finally hit her. "It felt like a joke," Touretzky says. "How could this all be happening at once?"

Nothing in Touretzky's life seemed to be going right during the month before she found herself in the emergency room. It started when the University of Delaware grad got back from studying abroad and her relationship with her boyfriend of more than a year ended abruptly. Less than a week later, during an interview for an internship with a major accounting firm, Touretzky was midsentence when the older male interviewer cut her off, telling her he couldn't tolerate listening to her talk anymore. When the interview ended, she burst into tears. After heartbreak, professional humiliation, and finally, having to pee into a filter for a week, it was official: Touretzky's life sucked.

When Katherine Brown, 34, a government employee in Washington, D.C., bought her fixer-upper house in 2013, she entertained happy fantasies about the community she'd be joining and the rose garden she would plant in the front yard. In actuality, the front yard was an irredeemable dirt patch littered with crack pipes and piles of excrement from the neighborhood dogs. And the community? It played craps on her front stoop late into the night. Brown had to battle a rat problem, followed by a bedbug infestation, which cost her thousands of dollars. During the fumigation, which took months, she had to evacuate the house repeatedly. Later, a pipe burst and flooded her basement.

The house problems were expensive and hellish, but Brown's woes didn't end there. In the midst of wrestling with her house problems, she kicked off a job search. She applied for 35 jobs and was rejected by all of them. Best of all, she got catfished on Match.com. She describes her streak of bad luck to be "almost hilarious."

Call it chance. Say bad things happen in threes. Tell them to make lemonade. However you cast it, you feel for these women, because you've been there too. In one way or another, at some point in our lives, we all go through a version of what Touretzky and Brown experienced: The Lifemageddon.

"Regular life is filled with traumatic events," says Mark Epstein, MD, a psychiatrist in New York City and author of The Trauma of Everyday Life. "Not just big ones like accidents and loss ... Difficult things are happening every day to someone and often to us." As life coach Gabrielle Bernstein, author of Miracles Now: 108 Life-Changing Tools for Less Stress, More Flow, and Finding Your True Purpose, puts it, "Everyone has had their dark night of the soul, their divine shitstorm." It's when the storm continues to pelt you that you wonder why it's all happening ... and what to do about it.

When Lifemageddon Strikes
There's no one way to react when you're hit with a series of unfortunate events. Lucy*, a 28-year-old actress in New York City, was "just crying all the time" during her Lifemageddon, she says. "I was the weird crying girl on the subway or during jury duty."

She had good reason to cry. Her father had been diagnosed with a rare form of head and neck cancer. Her boyfriend of four years had broken up with her. And because Lucy's ex was also her boss at a tech start-up, she had to quit. Oh, and one of her friends went into emergency surgery to have a brain tumor removed. Even as the waterworks flowed, Lucy kept on with her life. She was functional. Going to the hospital gave her purpose. Then her dad got better and her friend woke up — but Lucy's state got worse.

No longer needing to visit the hospital, Lucy stopped being able to get out of bed. She found excuses to drink heavily, and blackouts became a regular occurrence. She dove into ill-advised sexual relationships with two guy friends. "It was very rash but somehow felt therapeutic," Lucy says. "I might not have done it if I hadn't felt like I needed it so badly."

The behavior was risky but understandable. Normal, even. The actions Lucy took helped her "defend against the intolerable," as Dr. Epstein puts it, and people defend themselves in a number of different ways. "It's hard to classify human responses as typical or atypical," says Christine Montross, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University and author of Falling Into the Fire. "It depends so much on the kinds of things we're facing and what strengths we bring to those situations."

For instance, when you find yourself overwhelmed by something challenging, you might lash out at your coworkers, zone out and play video games nonstop, or eat way too much junk food. Or on the flip side, you might acknowledge right away that you're dealing with a difficult event and talk to friends, go to the gym, eat well, and get plenty of sleep (these choices, while not always easy, are obviously your better bet).

Another common response is to turn away from the suffering altogether in order to protect yourself ("Stuff it down!" as Stephen Colbert says), because suffering hurts. But while turning away from the pain may be a knee-jerk reaction, it's not the best way to process. "You suffer less in the short-term, but it ends up hurting more because you're creating so much tension within yourself," Dr. Epstein says. That's what happened to Nancy Borowick, a 29-year-old photographer in New York City. She received a double dose of terrible news and went into action mode. In 2011, Borowick's mother, after battling breast cancer over the course of nearly two decades, had her third diagnosis. With the focus on her mom's health, Borowick never expected that she would get more terrible news at dinner with her parents one night. Her father told her he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was inoperable. Borowick was completely sideswiped. "It was a massive shock to the system," she says.

Since her father didn't have much time, Borowick felt she had to get moving. She and her boyfriend of six years got engaged. The wedding, which distracted her, happened 10 months after her father broke his news. Both her parents walked her down the aisle. Two months later, Borowick's father died. Instead of going on a honeymoon, Borowick was making funeral arrangements. "It was a year-long adrenaline rush," Borowick says. "I was doing a million different things, and I kept myself extremely busy. I didn't give myself a chance to crumble."

But after she and her new husband got back from their delayed honeymoon, Borowick finally did crumble — in the middle of the airport. "It was like all of this finally became real, and I was going to be experiencing life without my dad." Her sadness and anxiety quickly became debilitating, which is when Borowick was able to acknowledge that, as friends had suggested throughout her roller-coaster year, she needed to take care of herself. "I have taken a step back and am focusing on what's important and best for me. I'm allowing myself to do that now."

Moving ForwardIn the midst of a Lifemageddon, it can seem like a break is nowhere in sight. What can help is to look for relief from sources that fortify you rather than weaken you.

"It's important to identify the things that are most healthy in our lives, so that when we hit periods of stress, we can automatically turn to those things," says Dr. Montross. Maybe you garden; maybe you run. Learning to practice meditation, starting therapy, and taking trapeze classes (yes) helped Borowick. Taking walks in the afternoon helped Lucy. Leaning on their networks of family and friends for support helped both of them.

But maybe you don't feel like you have a community nearby — you wouldn't be alone in feeling that way. In the last several decades, people have become less likely to be part of a club or a religious community or have close friends or family who live in their neighborhood, says David Campbell, Ph.D., director of the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame and coauthor of American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. "When you're getting together with people on a regular basis and interacting face-to-face, you get the sense that we're all in this together," Campbell says. Church, a support group, or therapy — or even a book club or a regular brunch with the same group of friends — can become the safe place you need and help you feel less alone. "What's really helpful is for someone to sit with you and say, 'I really hear how awful this time is.' There's solace in someone sharing that understanding with you," says Dr. Montross. Seeking support is actually a marker of health and sanity.

It's also important to listen to your body. If you feel depleted, go to bed earlier or find a way to take a day or two off work to recharge. Eat food that is healthy and makes you feel good. "If you're in the thick of something and you need a massage, go get a massage," says Rebecca Soffer, cofounder of the website Modern Loss. "You know deep down what you need."

If your initial response to a stressful situation is on the harmful end of the spectrum — whether you go on shopping sprees or hide, disappearing from Facebook and ignoring people's texts — start recognizing that sooner in your life than later. "The brain becomes practiced in dealing with negative events in certain ways, but you can change that if you pay attention to your patterns," says Meg Jay, Ph.D., a clinical assistant professor at the University of Virginia and author of The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter — and How to Make the Most of Them Now. Find sources of balance and comfort. Give yourself time to process. Even if you have made riskier choices, don't beat yourself up. "Trying to be kind to oneself is critical," Dr. Montross says.

Bad things don't necessarily produce silver linings, but if life really is this random, then chances are, good things will start to happen again. They did for Borowick, who photographed her parents during their treatment. Her work later catapulted her career and invited supportive responses from people all over the world. And good things started to happen for Lucy too. She landed a paid acting gig at a regional theater, where she bonded with a supportive community of colleagues.

While the worst seems to have passed, Lucy still struggles sometimes, but she has enough distance to reflect. "It's working on me in mysterious ways," she says. "I think that I've changed as a person and I'm probably seeing only the beginning of the change." Even though you'll probably never fully "get over" the events of your Lifemageddon, something better will happen — you'll come out wiser, says Dr. Epstein. "These traumas, these losses, they become us. We're seasoned by them."

What's Behind Lifemageddon?When everything bad seems to happen at once, is it random, or does it mean more? Three experts assess.

The Statistician Says:
"There are 7 billion people in the world. Somebody, somewhere, is just by chance going to have a few negative life events happen in quick succession. There's no mystical force. It's purely just chance." —David J. Hand, author, The Improbability Principle

The Psychiatrist Says:"Everyone goes through crises at some point, and when you do, you have to make a distinction between responsibility and blame. Responsibility is realizing that even if you didn't do anything to cause your disaster, you can take actions to climb out of a bad place. Blame is counterproductive. Focusing on pointing the finger only makes things worse." —Mark Epstein, MD, author, The Trauma of Everyday Life

The Astrologer Says:"When big, life-changing experiences happen in a person's life, one of two things is usually happening. It could be a Saturn return, which draws out unresolved problems and forces them to be dealt with. It could also be the transit of an outer planet, like Pluto or Neptune, to a personal planet, which triggers changes and can be destabilizing. A person's sign will go through processes of change and reorientation, and that can lead to instability and disruption. I believe that the disruptions and difficulties are intended to get us to clear out old emotional habit patterns and behaviors that are not working in our life, so that we can finally reach our goals." —Cosmo astrologer Aurora Tower

This article was originally published as "How to Deal When Your Life Explodes" in the July 2014 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition!

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